The Excruciating, 200-MPH World of Wingsuit Racing

JOE RIDLER HAS jumped out of an airplane nearly 700 times in his life, but when he makes the leap later today, the goal will be about more than reaching the ground safely. It will be to fly through the air faster, farther, and for longer than anyone else in the sky.

Ridler’s competing in the National Championships of Wingsuit Flying in Chicago, also known as wingsuit racing.

Ridler’s loved the idea of flying since he was a kid in northwest Minnesota, looking for a way to get away. Barred from a commercial or military flight career by eye problems, he was intrigued by BASE jumping, but abandoned the idea as too dangerous. So now he jumps out of planes and races through the sky at 200 mph.

Ridler’s first wingsuit flight was two years ago. It would have been sooner, but the US Parachute Association requires you complete 200 skydives before allowing you to exit a plane dressed like an amped up flying squirrel. “The one thing I was the most nervous about,” he says, was “strapping myself into a straight jacket and throwing myself out of a plane.”

The championships, hosted by the US Parachute Association, test competitors on three disciplines, each measured in a window between 3,000 and 2,000 meters of altitude: average speed, distance covered, and time spent aloft. Each flyer gets three jumps in each category, and is tracked via a GPS module on their helmet. They’re rated on a curve—whoever goes fastest, farthest, or stays in the window the longest gets a 100, everyone else a percentage of that—and scores are averaged to find an overall winner.

Two artists. Three fingers. News: Weiwei and I join hands to walk. We will walk out of London. We will each carry a single blanket. A symbol of the need that faces 60 million refugees in our world today. We welcome those who wish to walk with us. Bring your blanket. We will repeat this action in cities worldwide over the coming months. At 10am on Thursday 17th September we will walk from The Royal Academy of Arts we will walk east out of London. Route details will be announced. #AnishKapoor#Aiweiwei#RoyalAcademy#AnishAndWeiweiWalk@aiww@dirty_corner

Amazon Prime Acquires USA’s ‘Mr. Robot’

The company has acquired Universal Cable Production’s first-year critical darling, it was announced Friday.

Under the pact, Amazon Prime will become the exclusive subscription streaming home for Mr. Robot beginning this spring. All 10 episodes of the series will be available for Amazon Prime members in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria and Japan.

From creator Sam Esmail, Mr. Robot stars Rami Malek as an antisocial hacker hoping to overthrow society and Christian Slater as the leader of the hacker group hoping to help him to do just that.

“Mr. Robot is one the most compelling new dramas on television,” said Amazon vp digital video content acquisition Brad Beale in a statement. “Rami Malek delivers a mesmerizing performance and leads a great cast with an intriguing story full of dark twists. Prime members are going to love binging on this awesome show.”

This marks the latest deal between UCP and Amazon Prime, which is also home to Syfy’s Defiance and Warehouse 13 as well as USA’s own Suits.

‘Blood Moon’ seen as sign of end times by some Mormons

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A rare confluence of a lunar eclipse and a supermoon set to happen this weekend has prompted such widespread fear of an impending apocalypse that the Mormon Church was compelled to issue a statement cautioning the faithful to not get caught up in speculation about a major calamity.

Sunday night’s “blood moon” and recent natural disasters and political unrest around the world have led to a rise in sales at emergency preparedness retailers. Apocalyptic statements by a Mormon author have only heightened fears among a small number of Mormon followers about the looming end of time. The eclipse will give the moon a red tint and make it look larger than usual. It won’t happen again for 18 years.

It’s unclear how many Latter-day Saints buy the theory, but Mormon leaders were worried enough that they took the rare step this week of issuing a public statement cautioning the faithful not to get carried away with visions of the apocalypse.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints told its 15 million worldwide members that they should be “spiritually and physically prepared for life’s ups and downs,” but urged them not to take speculation from individual church members as doctrine and “avoid being caught up in extreme efforts to anticipate catastrophic events.”

The Mormons preparing to hunker down Sunday night aren’t alone. Some from other religions also fear a doomsday scenario. A Christian pastor in Texas has written a book predicting a world-shaking event.

Storing away enough food and water in case of disaster, job loss or something worse is part of the fundamental teachings of the religion. Many homes in Utah are equipped with special shelving for cans of beans, rice and wheat. The belief that regular history will someday end, bringing a second coming of Jesus, is embedded in the minds of Mormons and the church’s official name.

Watch the Intensive Process of Book Printing

Though many have embraced e-readers, it’s hard to beat the look and feel of a real print book. In fact, there are some who prefer to make books the old-fashioned way: By printing with letterpress and stitching everything together by hand. San Francisco-based Arion Press does just that—and in his show Raw Craft, Anthony Bourdain followed its artisans through the process, revealing just how much work goes into making a book almost entirely by hand. From proofreading the copy aloud to hand-sewing the binding, each tome assembled at Arion gets an enormous amount of attention and care. The result is a volume that’s also a work of art.

Sleep paralysis: the waking nightmare where you can’t move or speak

When most people hear the word ‘nightmare’ they think of a scary dream that may involve a person’s teeth falling out, public humiliation, or being hunted by a scary monster. In these sorts of nightmares it is easy to know when the dream ends, as we are jarred awake and find ourselves surprisingly safe and secure in the comfortable confines of our bedroom. The original nightmare, however, was a different beast entirely.

This older conception was much more frightening and, in certain cultures, even believed to be life-threatening. Nightmares in this more archaic sense consisted of being:

(1) paralyzed except for your eyes

(2) oppressed (or feeling a weight on your chest)

(3) mute (i.e. unable to call out for help)

These three experiences all took place while you were clearly awake and, not surprisingly, also led to strong feelings of terror. Making matters worse (or at least scarier), nightmares usually had visual and tactile elements just as vivid as anything experienced in daily life.

Different times and cultures made sense of the nightmare in their own ways, and wove these experiences into many rich folklore traditions.

Some people believed that the nightmare was an actual nocturnal assault (by demons, ghosts, vampires, witches or extraterrestrials). This resulted in attempts to prevent further attacks, like placing crosses in the bedroom, or even go on the offensive, i.e. sleeping with knives or other weapons.

The tech behind how Volkswagen tricked emissions tests

Volkswagen isn’t hiding from its emissions cheating scandal, which the company now says affects some 11 million diesel cars worldwide.

“Let’s be clear about this: Our company was dishonest with the EPA and the California Air Resources Board and with all of you,” Volkswagen U.S. chief Michael Horn said Monday night. “In my German words, we have totally screwed up.”

Regulators allege that Volkswagen installed software into its cars that allowed the autos to circumvent EPA tests. But that still doesn’t explain how VW vehicles were able to determine when they were being subjected to an emissions test in the first place.

To understand more about how Volkswagen cheated, we have to know a bit about the EPA’s testing process. When carmakers test their vehicles against EPA standards, they place a car on rollers and then perform a series of specific maneuvers prescribed by federal regulations. Among the most common tests for passenger cars is the Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule (UDDS), which simulates 7.5 miles of urban driving. Here’s what that looks like, expressed as a speed profile.

Why smart people actually believe Mercury retrograde ruins lives

If you spilled a whiskey all over your computer or signed a lease for a bedbug-filled apartment, relax! It’s probably not your fault; it’s probably Mercury retrograde.

The astrological phenomenon, which started Thursday and goes until Oct. 9, is the hottest scapegoat in town, the juice cleanse of the cosmos, if you will.

According to astrological hucksters (and the flocks who follow them), the three periods each year when Mercury appears to be moving backward are total pandemonium, a time when the stars are liable to wreak havoc on technical devices, morning commutes and official documents.

Too bad it’s total nonsense. Mercury retrograde isn’t responsible for the G train being late or your iPhone freezing up, any more than that black cat that crossed your path gave you bad luck.

And yet, belief in “Mercury retrograde” is getting stronger and stronger. My social media feeds are filled with comments from otherwise logical, educated people who take the phenomenon seriously.

Motion City Soundtrack – ‘Panic Stations’ (album stream)

The Minneapolis-based emo kids in Motion City Soundtrack are all grown up and ready to return with Panic Stationsnext week. But before the nautically-themed set of songs washes ashore, Exclaim! is giving you an early listen to the album in its entirety.

In addition references to water and the ocean, the new record grapples with “an overarching idea of letting go and not being immobilized by your own thoughts.” Inspiration was also taken from works like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Another McDonald’s Bummer: The McRib Is Coming Back, But There’s a Tragic Downside

Maybe McDonald’s should change its name to the Chicago Cubs, because it keeps breaking hearts left and right.

We celebrated the fact that McDonald’s was finally going forward with all-day breakfast, only to be brought back down to earth when we realized that it would be a limited menu. And then we realized that the McRib is coming back, but unfortunately, there’s yet another catch that the fast food chain has for us.

This roller coaster of emotions must be stopped! We want to get off this ride!

CNBC is reporting that locations were just given the option of selling the iconic McRib sandwich, and it seems that this year a staggering amount of restaurants opted out.

In fact, the McRib is now so elusive that you probably had no idea it was back on the menu already, and that’s because so few locations are actually selling it. In fact, according to CNBC, only 8,000 of the 14,350 McDonald’s in the U.S. will sell the McRib. That’s 75 percent less than last year!

For more than 50 years, Univision’s ‘Sábado Gigante’ was truly a giant

By Carlos Harrison

DORAL, FLA. — An electric excitement surges through the crowd gathered in the Univision studios in this city just west of Miami. As Mario “Don Francisco” Kreutzberger steps out of the wings, the fans in the bleachers who’ve traveled here from Guatemala and Chile, California and Kansas City and beyond erupt in cheers and wild applause.

These lucky folks are experiencing history: They’re the last members of the general public to be the studio audience of “Sábado Gigante” (“Giant Saturday”), the hugely popular — and longest-running — variety show that has dominated Spanish-language television for more than half a century.

And like audiences before them for the past 53 years, they’re eating up the corny antics of Kreutzberger, the show’s creator and only host for its entire run. They laugh as he mugs in a variety of goofy hats during the signature talent competition, “El Chacal de la Trompeta” (“The Trumpet Jackal”) and howl at the sexual-innuendo-laden comedy sketches. When the first comedian’s mike gives off a static buzz, Kreutzberger hands him his own. “Since the show’s ending,” he deadpans to laughter, “they only give us half as many working microphones.”

Yes, sadly, the glitzy, zany hodgepodge that is “Sábado Gigante” — part game show, part talent show, part comedy show, part musical entertainment and, often enough, serious interview show with newsmakers and world leaders — ends Saturday, leaving mourning viewers in its wake.

Warhol’s Famous Jews Stolen from L.A. Movie Studio and Replaced with Fakes

Nine of Andy Warhol‘s prints of Jewish icons like Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein valued at $350,000 have gone missing from the walls of a movie editing studio in Los Angeles. An industrious thief reportedly created fake versions of the works and installed them in place of the originals, according to TMZ.

The switcheroo came to light when a member of the family business took the works to a framer because he noticed that they were sagging. The framer tipped his customer off that they were fake, leading to a police investigation.

Giant Radio Telescope Could Detect E.T.’s Call

A huge telescope array will allow scientists to conduct the most sensitive and exhaustive search for signs of alien civilizations to date when it comes online, the project’s backers say.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), currently planned to begin construction in 2018, could enable the search for intelligent alien life to piggy-back on other scientific observations, scouring the galaxy with unprecedented precision.

“A unique aspect for the search of life in the universe is the question of whether advanced lifeevolves intelligence,” Andrew Siemion said at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]

The Earth has 3 trillion trees, study finds

(CNN) – The good news: A new study finds that there are 3.04 trillion trees on Earth, 7½ times more than previous estimates.

That’s more than 3,000,000,000,000. A whopping 12 zeros. Roughly 422 trees — a tiny forest! — for every person on the planet.

The bad news? Researchers estimate that the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46% since the dawn of human civilization. And we’re mostly to blame.

An international team of researchers employed satellite imagery, forest inventories and supercomputer technologies to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level. The resulting study, led by scholars at Yale University, was published this week in the journal Nature (PDF).

The 157 acres atop the city has traded hands from the Shah of Iran’s sister to Merv Griffin to the mogul behind Herbalife. Then came unknown Chip Dickens, who managed to procure the property for no money at all. Now, The Vineyard is on the market, and the strange, stressful story behind the $1 billion property can be told.

Standing atop a verdant summit near Benedict Canyon, Brad Pitt smoked a cigarette and gazed toward the ocean. A gentle afternoon sun played over the chaparral and sage below. It was 2002, and Pitt had come to Beverly Hills to take stock of a coveted piece of real estate. From the San Gabriel Mountains to Malibu, Los Angeles stretched out in a quiet, glittery panorama. It was the highest peak for miles, a true king’s plot. He turned to Gary Morris, a developer and friend. “So?” mused Pitt. “You think I should buy this?”

Morris told Pitt that if he “made another movie or two,” he could probably afford it. An L.A. native with salt-and-pepper hair and a wiry frame born of years of ultra-marathons, Morris knew better than to be more than a sounding board. He had watched as one figure after another became entranced with the property known as The Vineyard Beverly Hills before moving on. A few years after Pitt’s visit, Tom Cruise placed about 3 percent of the $25 million sale price for one lot in escrow. But on the last day before the transaction went “hard,” locking the actor’s money in, Cruise’s business manager canceled the order, according to multiple people familiar with the transaction. There had been other offers, and yet two decades after Morris first got involved, a single house never had been built.

Perched on a summit ridgeline with huge views looking down on the homes of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, The Vineyard is one of the last undeveloped plots in Beverly Hills, and arguably the most impressive. Visitors can peer down on estates belonging to Warren Beatty, Seth MacFarlane and the rooftop mansions of Beverly Park. For decades, the 157-acre property has bewitched some of Hollywood’s most illustrious residents, from Merv Griffin to the Shah of Iran’s sister. With little money, no real estate license and a lot of gumption, the de facto owner for the past 11 years has been Charles “Chip” Dickens. “I’m the most improbable character in this whole thing,” Dickens, 54, tells The Hollywood Reporter. His main partner is an amiable convicted felon named Victorino Noval; together, the two now are marketing The Vineyard for $1 billion.

The saga behind one of the most pedigreed and controversial pieces of property in L.A. could be torn from the pages of a Coen brothers script. After 15 years of intense legal drama over ownership, family squabbling and an inheritance, The Vineyard might be changing hands again. And what once was no more than a dusty mountaintop has been transformed into an exquisite plateau with a helicopter pad and ample room for any architect’s wildest fantasies. “It’s the most spectacular property anywhere in Los Angeles,” says Robert Mann, an attorney who is familiar with The Vineyard. Now, with real estate prices soaring in Los Angeles and foreign buyers pouring in, The Vineyard is poised to be the most talked-about trophy property in years. “This is one of the most exceptional properties I’ve ever seen in my 30-year career,” says Jeff Hyland, whose agency, Hilton & Hyland, has exclusive rights to The Vineyard. “This is as good as it gets.”

Netflix’s first theatrical release deserves to be watched at the cinema

by N.B. | VENICE

CARY FUKUNAGA’s “Beasts of No Nation” is the most controversial film in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, but not because of its subject matter. The controversial part is that it is being distributed by Netflix, making this the first time that the internet-streaming service has put its name to a theatrically released film. But it’s the phrase “theatrically released” which is the problem.

In March, Netflix announced that it would be offering “Beasts of No Nation” online to its subscribers on the very day (October 16th) that the film was going into cinemas. Exhibitors—that is, cinema owners—were not pleased. Four American chains announced that they wouldn’t be showing “Beasts of No Nation” at all, their argument being that, if cinemas are to survive, they must be allowed exclusive access to new films for several weeks before they are available elsewhere. If Netflix wouldn’t go along with this practice, they said, then its film deserved to be boycotted. The fact that the Venice Festival went on to select “Beasts of No Nation” as one of its competition entries must have felt like a kick in the teeth. People everywhere are opting to watch movies on laptops rather than in cinemas. If the world’s oldest film festival won’t discourage them, then who will?

A more pertinent question is whether festivals have an obligation to support exhibitors at all. Venice’s Biennale is officially designated a “Mostra Internazionale D’Arte Cinematografica”, which suggests that its remit is to celebrate films rather than the buildings where they are shown. If a film ends up being viewed on a screen that’s 15 inches wide rather than 50 feet wide, then so be it. “Exhibitors have got to wake up and smell the coffee,” as one publicist said to me in Venice. “Things are changing and they’re not about to change back.”

The story gets more complicated when you see the film itself. To put it mildly, “Beasts of No Nation” is quite something. Adapted from Uzodinma Iweala’s novel, it is an immersive fable about a boy in an unnamed African country whose family is executed in front of him during a civil war. Fleeing into the jungle, he is adopted by a charismatic commandant (Idris Elba), and brainwashed into becoming a guerrilla fighter. There are times when he enjoys the summer-camp cameraderie he shares with his fellow child-soldiers. But he also has to machete innocent strangers, submit to sexual abuse and drug use, and watch while his new friends are gunned down. The horrors of war have rarely been catalogued more horrifically.

Is this parking attendant at Dismaland, right, actually the artist Banksy, thought to be shown in the picture at left?Photos via Daily Mail.

The notorious street artist known as Banksy may be hiding in plain sight at his “bemusement park,” called Dismaland.

Eagle-eyed observers have discerned a similarity between the man featured in the photo above that purportedly shows the British maverick and a man working as a parking attendant at the ironic theme park in the English resort town of Weston-Super-Mare, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

In 2008, the Daily Mail released an image of Robin Gunningham, from Bristol, who Banksy fans suspect is the mystery artist. A single photograph supposedly showing him in sunglasses with tousled hair was taken in Jamaica in 2004.

Gunningham is 38. The parking attendant looks to our eye like a man about 10 years older than that, but there is a striking similarity to the men’s noses.

An Unprecedented Success for Electronic Dance Music and Its D.J.s

By STEPHEN HEYMAN

Laurent Cilluffo

Late last month, Forbes published its list of the world’s top-earning D.J.s. Calvin Harris, 31, who less than a decade ago was stocking groceries in a Scottish supermarket, came in first place, earning $66 million over a 12-month period beginning in June last year through club fees, endorsement deals and music royalties. That’s more than what Jay Z ($56 million) or Kim Kardashian ($52.5 million) grossed in the same period, and it’s one of many recent indications that EDM, or electronic dance music — once the commercially marginal soundtrack to underground parties — has reached an impressive new level of mainstream success.

Kevin Watson, an analyst in London for the International Music Summit (an electronic music industry trade event held yearly on the Spanish island of Ibiza) now estimates the global value of EDM to be $6.9 billion — about a 50 percent jump since 2013. “Here in the U.K., we’ve had peaks of interest before but we have seen nothing like the global cultural exposure and move into the mainstream as we have in the last two years,” he said. “It’s been absolutely phenomenal.”

A Meteor Exploded Over Bangkok on Monday Morning

Citizens of the Thai capital Bangkok witnessed a huge fireball descending on the horizon this morning, and thanks to the dashcams in their cars, we can admire the celestial visitor from several different angles.

The meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere around 8.45am local time, and burnt up in a huge fireball after striking down from the sky. The meteor was big and bright, but definitely smaller than the infamous Chelyabinsk meteor which exploded over Russia in 2013, damaging 7,200 buildings in six cities in the southern Ural region. There are no reports of any damage from Bangkok so far.

How does a bicycle stay upright?

(Image: Matthew Richardson)

We thought we knew the maths behind cycling. We were wrong – and our efforts to figure it out are leading to some weird and wonderful new bike designs

In 2011, an international team of bi-pedal enthusiasts dropped the bombshell that, despite 150 years of analysis, no one knows how a bicycle stays upright. Across the world, riders dismounted and stared at their bikes in disbelief. What they had been doing for years was a feat inexplicable by science.

Well, sort of. “What we don’t know are the simple, necessary or sufficient conditions for a bicycle to be self-stable,” says Andy Ruina, an engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

We have relied on trial-and-error engineering to construct stable bikes that aren’t prone to toppling while in motion. Explaining how they work mathematically requires around 25 variables, such as the angle of the front forks relative to the road, weight distribution and wheel size.

This algorithm can create a new Van Gogh or Picasso in just an hour

The algorithm was given this photo of buildings, left, and a copy of Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” In about an hour it taught itself to mimic Van Gogh’s style, and apply it to the photo of the buildings. (University of Tuebingen)

For great artists, creating a masterpiece is the culmination of a career. Years of practice, creative musings and experimentation with styles build up to the genesis of something truly original and timeless.

A story is often told about Pablo Picasso charging an enormous sum for a portrait. The physical act of drawing it took only a few moments, so the subject complained to Picasso. He is said to have responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

While the great art of yesteryear was an exhaustive process to create, today the style of those masters can be mimicked in minutes. Last week German researchers released a paper detailing how a computer algorithm could be used to pump out images borrowing the styles of the world’s greatest artists.

Keith Richards Is Wrong—Heavy Metal Is Not a ‘Great Joke’

By dismissing Black Sabbath and Metallica, a Rolling Stone reveals his distinct rock and roll philosophy

This past week in an interview with Jim Farber for the Daily News, Keith Richards made some ornery, old-guy cranky statements about the Beatles, Rap, and Heavy Metal. First of all, there’s no reason to waste any ink discussing what he said about Rap. His comments echo the thoughts of any senior citizen in a cop bar in Staten Island, and can be explained by indifference, lack of familiarity with the genre and generational confusion. No big deal. Seriously, I would assume any 72-year-old guy who claimed to “get” rap was just lying.

However, Richards’ comments about Black Sabbath and Metallica being “great jokes” are worth (far) deeper examination. This two-word slur is both completely unsurprising yet remarkably revealing.

To parse Richards’ comment, we have to go back to the dawn of British rock, and it’s spiral into diversity (and differing interpretations) in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Obviously, The Rolling Stones were a blues-based band. The Stones, the arguably superior Pretty Things, and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (to name three) personify one branch of the early Britrock leviathan; this limb was almost completely devoted to interpreting Chicago and Delta blues in an amped up and English-accented fashion. Let’s call this Group A.

The other branch is, well, characterized by the more simplistic gory glory of the Kinks, the Who, and the Troggs. These groups certainly shared some of the same basic influences as Group A, but inflected it with lusty teenage primitivism fueled by barre chords. Significantly, although these Group B bands drew from Chicago blues and the straightforward I/IV/V forms of Chuck Berry, they did not draw from the Delta in any real way, which is why you virtually never hear an open-tuned slide part on records by any Group B band. To put it a little more simply, all these bands—the Stones faction and the Kinks faction—listened to Bo Diddley, but only the Group A branch integrated Robert Johnson and Elmore James into their work. This was on your SATs, right?

The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks

by Steve Silberman

photo by John Midgley

Pioneering neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died Sunday, August 30 at age 82. In his writings about patients’ sometimes bizarre case studies—which he would call “neurological novels”—Sacks was able to draw out the humanity in pathology. Steve Silberman wrote about Sacks’ own case study in 2002.

One night in 1940, a bomb tumbled out of the sky into a garden in North London, exploding into thousands of droplets of white-hot aluminum oxide, which cascaded over the lawn. The buckets of water that the inhabitants of the house at 37 Mapesbury Road—two Jewish doctors and their sons—poured on the fire only fed its chemical vehemence. Amazingly, no one was hurt, but the brilliance of the bomb left an indelible image in the mind of Oliver Sacks, who was 7 years old the night it fell.

The thermite bomb was the second of two delivered to Mapesbury Road during the war. The first, a 1,000-pound monster, landed next door, but failed to explode. Sacks remembered both scenes vividly while writing the memoir he published last October, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. After the book was published, however, the neurologist and author learned that his memory had deceived him, as memories made unreliable by disorders of the brain had played tricks on the minds of the subjects of his books. His brother Michael told him that, on the night the thermite bomb fell, in fact, they were both away at boarding school.

“I told him, ‘But I can see it now in my mind. Why?’” Sacks recalled last November. Michael explained that it was because their brother David had written them a dramatic letter about the incident. Even after Sacks accepted this as fact, a visual image of the second bomb still burned in his memory. Looking more deeply, however, he noticed a curious difference between his memories of the two bombs. “After the first one fell”—the bomb that didn’t explode—“Michael and I went down the road at night in our pajamas, not knowing what would happen. In that memory, I can feel myself into the body of that little boy. And in the second memory”—the thermite bomb—“it’s as if I’m seeing a brilliantly illuminated scene from a film: I cannot locate myself anywhere in the scene.”

Sacks has been turning his analytical gaze inward more often these days, after four decades of studying the minds of those with such disorders as autism, Tourette’s syndrome, loss of proprioception, and the sudden onset of color blindness. His tales from the borderlands of the mind, translated into 21 languages, have earned Sacks a worldwide readership. This month, he will be awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, given to scientists who have made a significant achievement in literature, and his insights have been ported to a broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author. His 1973 book, Awakenings, inspired both a play by Harold Pinter and a 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Two years ago, a chapter from An Anthropologist on Mars also got the Hollywood treatment in a movie called At First Sight. His first best-seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (published in 1985), has been turned into a one-act play, an opera, and a theatrical production in French staged by Peter Brook.

Noah Davis, in an undated photo, founded the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. Credit Ed Templeton

Noah Davis, a painter and installation artist who founded the Underground Museum, an exhibition space in a working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles that provides free art shows, died on Saturday at his home in Ojai, Calif. He was 32.

He learned he had cancer a few years ago, his family said in confirming the death.

Mr. Davis’s paintings were mostly figurative works depicting blacks in surreal landscapes, sometimes with their features distorted or smeared in a manner reminiscent of Francis Bacon. He drew inspiration from sources as varied as Richard Brautigan’s 1968 novella “In Watermelon Sugar” and “The Jerry Springer Show.”

“The palette is very moody and evocative, and he has an extraordinary ability to convey emotional effect,” Helen Molesworth, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, said by telephone Tuesday.

Mr. Davis founded the Underground Museum with his wife, the artist Karon Davis, in 2012 (they had married in 2008) in a row of storefronts in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Mr. Davis organized eclectic shows there like “The Oracle,” which combined sculptures by Henry Taylor, 19th-century carvings from Sudan and a video installation by his brother, the video artist Kahlil Joseph. The work, titled “m.A.A.d,” is a 15-minute paean to the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles set to the music of Kendrick Lamar.